Help! Lag When Hosting Games Over XBox LIVE

[Nembot]

Hi Guys!

I have cable BB (was NTL now Virgin Media) which has a ethernet cable running into a wireless router to then split between my PC and my 360.

When I host a game of Gears of War for at least the whole of the first round everybody gets the "connection error" flash up everytime you run 3 feet and for the majority of the game, players complain about unplayable lag, also when I`m talking to people they say that my voice is constantly breaking up.

I have disabled the NAT on my router as well as putting my 360 in a DMZ which didn`t help at all. I was on 2mb and have since upgraded to 4mb which has also made no difference. I was thinking that the problem may still lie with my router and was considering buying a switch.

It`s getting frustrating and worrying as I know people opperating on 2mb cable BB and when I play in their games I have an almost host like connection. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers!

Nembot

[Bleeders]

Is your IP configured correctly in your router mate?

[Nembot]

Is your IP configured correctly in your router mate?

Hiya fella!

You mean the 360`s IP for the DMZ or just my IP in general?

The answer is yes on both counts anyway.

[Soi]

To help, you'll need to give more info. Upload bandwidth and latency (ping times) determine whether you are a good host. There is a thread in the online folder on it, if you want more info.

If people drop out when you host, then either you haven’t got the upload bandwidth to cope with the amount of players, or your latency is too high.

Answer these questions, and I'll try to help more.

1) Is your NAT open? Do a Network Test on the 360 to see.
2) Go to www.speedtest.net and check your upload bandwidth. Upload determines how good a host you are. Download bandwidth has nothing to do with it.
3) Go to a command prompt and type “ping www.bbc.co.uk”. This gives a measure of latency in ms. The lower the better.
4) Does anyone share your connection?
5) If someone does share your connection, were they using it at the time? Uploading photos or sending emails with large attachments would suck up all your upload bandwidth.

[MattyD]

It could be the MTU / RWIN settings of your PC or (more likely) the router. The MTU dictates how large the packets are and the RWIN affects how much data your machine can receive before it sends a response signal.

There's a helpful page about how to optimise these here, but rather than using the suggested software (which alters the Windows registry) you'll have to make the changes through your router's config interface.

[Nembot]

That`s brilliant.

Cheers for your advice lads, I`ll have a look when I get home from work.